Home
by E. Limberg
Summary: Speculation on how Beckett comes home after leaving to chase LokSat. Spoilers for season 8.


**Home**

She takes a deep breath to calm herself down and wipes the tear tracks off of her cheeks before she knocks on the door in front of her.

It is almost a full minute before the door opens. "Kate?" Castle says hesitantly.

"I'm so sorry, Castle. I've made a horrible mistake," she only briefly meets his eyes before her gaze falls to her feet.

"If you need more clothes, Kate, it's fine. You asked for space, and I'm trying to respect your wishes. We don't have to make this any harder for ourselves. I'll just wait out here in the living room while you gather what you need," the writer says, opening the door wider for her to come into the loft.

There is a long pause before Beckett finally responds. "I don't want space anymore. I just want to come home, Castle."

Castle reaches for her hand, pulling her over the threshold and into the loft. Once the door is shut, he wraps his arms around her, enveloping her in a tight hug. "This is always your home, Kate, as long as you want it to be," he whispers, kissing the top of her head as she relaxes into him, her own wrapping around his back.

She allows herself a few moments of peace in her husband's arms before she pulls back to look at him. "I know that I've caused you a lot of pain and that I've damaged our marriage. It's going to take time for you to be able to trust me again, and I deserve that; but I hope that one day you'll be able to forgive me for what I've done."

"I love you, Kate, and I've already forgiven you. But I need to understand what happened; I need to know what I did so wrong that it made you leave me."

"You did absolutely nothing wrong, Rick. You've been so wonderful. And I know you've been trying to win me back ever since I left, but the truth is you never really lost me, Castle. I never stopped loving you, and walking away from you that night was probably the hardest thing I have ever done," she tries to explain, her hazel eyes remaining locked on his blue ones.

"Then why did you leave?" he frowns, not understanding how she could have left when she still loved him and he hadn't done anything to upset her.

She looks away for a moment before reaching for his hand and leading him to the couch to sit down. "I left because I was trying to protect you."

"Protect me? Kate, if you didn't want me to be hanging around the precinct now that you're captain, you could have just told me. I would miss working with you and the boys, but I would understand. You didn't have to move out in order to prove some point about protecting me."

"It's not the precinct that I'm worried about. Although we might have to revisit the topic if you're going to keep hanging out with Slaughter."

"What are you trying to protect me from then?"

A few tears leak out of her eyes, and she quickly wipes them away with her free hand. "Vikram is dead."

"Your pal from the Attorney General's office? The one who almost got you killed?"

"His warning that there was a death squad coming after me may be the only reason I'm still alive right now, Castle. And it's my fault that he's been killed."

"What does his death have to do with protecting me? I'm not understanding your logic here because it appears to me that you're the one in danger here. Kate… what have you gotten yourself into? I thought this LokSat thing was over."

"It's not; she was just set up to take the fall for all of this. Vikram and I were still investigating and trying to bring LokSat down."

"I would've helped you. When we were trying to bring Bracken down, we agreed that we would do this together. Was Bracken right about this? Are you too obsessed with this case to just be happy as my wife?"

"I couldn't let you get involved in this, Castle. I let Vikram work with me on this, and look where it got him. It could have been you that I found dead in my hotel room this evening, Rick, and I wouldn't be able to live with myself if something were to happen to you."

"And I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you," Castle fired back at her.

"You married a cop; you have to know that it's always a possibility that I won't come home one day."

"And you were just promoted to captain. I thought that being out of the field would provide a little more safety."

"Montgomery was captain, and he still got killed," she retorts, anger rising.

"Montgomery made a bad decision in his past, and it caught up with him. And he died trying to protect you, and you're just wasting it by trying to throw your life away again."

The captain rises and stalks away from the couch toward the front door. Thinking that she is going to leave him again, he reaches out to grab her wrist but misses. He closes his eyes in frustration, wondering why they couldn't just have their happily ever after. After a few moments, he realizes that he had not heard the door slam shut behind her as she left; she hadn't shut the door the last time she had walked out on him so maybe she hadn't this time either. He gets up from the couch and heads to close the door.

He is surprised to find his wife siting on the floor with her back against the door, tears falling freely from her eyes now. Slowly he sinks to the ground beside her, careful to put some space between their bodies. He patiently waits for her anger to abate and her tears to slow before he speaks. "I'm sorry, Kate. Part of why I fell in love with you is because you always fight for justice for the victim and never back down when it gets tough. I guess it is kind of hypocritical for me to want you to let this case go, especially when this is the most important case of your life."

"You have nothing to apologize for, Castle. I'm the one who has broken us and owes you a million apologies," she says quietly, scooting closer to lay her head on his shoulder. A few moments of silence pass before she speaks again. "I can't do this anymore, Rick."

"Kate, we can figure this out."

"No, we can't, Castle."

He opens his mouth to protest, to insist that they can make it through this and that she hasn't broken them for good, but her next words make him realize that they are not talking about the same thing.

"They left Vikram's tortured body in my hotel room and wrote a message in his blood on the mirror. A warning for me to give this up or they're going to kill you. I was trying to protect you from all of this, and they just brought you to the center of it."

"This is important to you, Kate. We can solve this once and for all; we just have to give it some time to cool off and be smart in our investigation."

"No, risking my own life for this is one thing, but I'm not going to put you in the crosshairs in order to solve this," Beckett says adamantly. "Maybe one day your stepmother will bring LokSat down, but we are not going to be involved in this case anymore. And if I find out you're working on this behind my back with your PI resources, I will kill you myself, Castle."

"What are you talking about? My stepmother?"

"I thought I told you…"

"We didn't exactly talk much before you walked out."

"I guess Jackson is married. Rita works for some unknown government agency that is not the CIA, and she's been trying to track down LokSat for a year. She saved me and Vikram from the death squad a couple times. She told me to just let this go, that it would be my fault if anyone else died over this."

"And that's why you cut me out of this? Because some woman who claims to be married to my father - whom we all know cannot be trusted - told you that it was your fault if anyone else died while you sought justice for your mother?"

Kate pulls back to look at him, "It's my fault that Vikram is dead. And I know that it's incredibly selfish of me, but I am so glad that it is not you, Rick. I've already got plenty of blood on my hands, but I'm not about to let your blood be added to them."

The writer studies his wife for a long moment before finally speaking. "Last year we vowed to always be partners in life, and you walked out on me without an explanation. Right after we had promised that there would be no more secrets between us. You were so angry at me a few years ago when I was keeping secrets to try to protect you, and now I can understand why."

"You have every right to be angry with me. I knew there would be repercussions when I left. But I want to make this work, Castle; I want to get back to building our life together. The thought of losing you terrifies me, but I would much rather have you break up with me over this than live in a world without you."

"I can understand wanting to protect the ones you love. But at some point we have to stop doing this to each other; we just keep hurting each other, and as much as we love each other, there is going to come a day when we can't overcome the hurt and secrecy."

She takes his hand and squeezes it, "No more secrets, Castle. And if I ever try to leave you again, handcuff me to something so that I can't."

He grins and squeezes her hand before standing, pulling her up with him, "I may just have to handcuff you to me that way you can never leave me again."

She hesitantly returns his smile, but when he leans in to kiss her, she places a hand on his chest to still him. "There's something else you need to know, Castle."

"What is it?"

"I… maybe we should sit down?" she suggests.

He leads her through the living room and into his office, waiting for her to wedge herself into the corner of the couch before seating himself beside her. "Whatever it is, Kate, we can work through it."

"We think that LokSat may have been behind your disappearance last year."

"But we knew nothing about LokSat at the time. And we already have an explanation; I was saving the word from a terrorist plot."

"Or that's what they want you to think. Jenkins told you that you were working with the CIA to rescue your high school friend who had information on a terror plot. LokSat is a high-ranking official in the CIA; he could have gotten his people to feed you any story he wanted to get you to stop looking into it."

"But why would he have kidnapped me if we were no threat to him at the time? We had just arrested Bracken and thought this case was over."

"To get back at me for arresting Bracken. To keep me from looking any further into Bracken after we arrested him and learning about any accomplices he may have had."

"So they took me in order to give you some other case to focus on? But then trying to figure out what happened to me ultimately would lead you back to Bracken and to LokSat."

"It's been over a year since you were taken, and we have nothing to connect them to your disappearance. We wouldn't even know about LokSat if the memo hadn't accidentally been un-redacted."

"Why kidnap me for two months and then let me return? Why not just kill me?"

"Because if you turned up dead, I would have kept investigating and eventually caught them. But they made it look like you wanted to leave me, and had I not believed you, we would have split up. And when that didn't work, they convinced you that you wanted your memories erased to make you think that you had done something horrible, which made you not want to know what happened. And when we did start poking around again, they fed you some story about saving the world to stop you from looking further for once and for all."

"I'm usually all over this conspiracy stuff and figuring out the story, but where is the proof that any of this is true, Kate?" he asks, skeptical of her explanation.

"We don't really have any. We came across a single text message on Allison Hyde's phone that was from the same night you were told you helped stop a terror plot; it was from a burner phone and just said 'Rook bought the story. We're in the clear.' We were trying to trace the heroin to figure out who is behind this; we haven't gotten anywhere, but we think part of their distribution ring is in Thailand."

"And if they sent me over there to make it harder to find me, then that explains how I got Dengue Fever. But what about the bullet wound? And the scenes from my dreams of getting chased through the jungle?"

"You could have been shot trying to escape, to get back home to us. And they altered some of your memories; they probably could have planted other ones. Who knows what really happened over there? Maybe you were actually involved in a jungle chase. I admit that it would have taken planning for them to have the terror plot all worked out and the memories just right, but it can probably be done."

"I don't know, Kate. You believe some of my theories, and they can be pretty far-fetched. I want to believe you…"

"But you also want to believe that you were a hero," she finishes for him with a small smile. "I understand, Castle. We have no proof of what really happened to you during those two months, your memory has been tampered with, and all we have is the word of some unreliable sources."

"I want answers, Kate. I want to know why I missed our wedding. But if this is going to get us killed, then I can live with not knowing."

"And I can accept that I'm not going to know who Bracken was working with."

"Then it's settled. For our own safety, we let this go for now," he pulls her in for another hug.

"Thank you for being so understanding, Rick. I missed you so much; every single day I thought about coming home to you."

"I'm glad that you're back, Kate," he kisses her temple before laying back on the couch, bringing her down to lay on top of him. "I just hope that when I wake up tomorrow you'll still be here."

"I'm not going anywhere, Castle. Not unless you're going with me," she smiles at him before leaning down to kiss him after six long weeks apart.


End file.
